Chapter 2, Stereotyped Knowledge, examines irregular practitioners’ global trade in cheap manuals on venereal disease, sexual debility, and fertility problems. While previous scholarship has largely focused on these manuals’ lurid depictions of weakened male bodies, this chapter emphasizes their origins in respected publications: often calling themselves “consulting surgeons,” a term from hospital practice, irregular practitioners combined verbatim sections from textbooks and treatises aimed at medics with snippets from works in other genres to construct their own “popular treatises.” Some of these productions were issued in several different languages and circulated around the globe. At home and abroad, they offered readers an affordable means of acquiring modern information about sex reproduction, derived from the science of anatomy, and their authors a means of cultivating trust in their expertise and advertising more expensive products and services. Examining other medical practitioners’ responses, this chapter argues that these manuals and their makers were seen as both an economic and existential threat to regular medicine.

Chapter 1, Holywell Street Medicine, traces the pornography trade’s birth out of the collapse of revolutionary politics in the 1820s, and shows how early agents in the trade scavenged for content to fill lists of sexual material. This fostered a vibrant mid-century traffic in cheap reprints and reworkings of works on contraception, venereal disease, fertility, and midwifery alongside pornographic novels and prints, bawdy songbooks, and other sexual material, operating out of London’s Holywell Street and other thoroughfares near the Strand. While showing how these agents harnessed the expanding infrastructures of the press and the post to sell their wares works across the nation, this chapter demonstrates that they framed medical works through two different, but compatible, lenses. Following a long line of disreputable publishers, Holywell Street publishers framed medical works as titillating reading material. However, they also adapted earlier radical arguments for sex education and female sexual pleasure, marketing medical works as containers of practical information about the body that readers could apply to support safe, active, and pleasurable sex lives.

The conclusion, Victorian Ignorance, places the history that Selling Sexual Knowledge has traced into conversation with the emergence of a new history of sexual knowledge at the dawn of the twentieth century. While considering how well publishing activities that the book explores would have served Victorian readers, it argues that the ways Victorians discussed their reading experiences evince what the historian Kate Fisher has called an “epistemology of sexual ignorance,” in which sexual knowledge is thought of as a set of facts that must be learned through interaction with an expert. It further argues that commercial and rhetorical practices explored in the book not only encouraged this way of conceptualizing sexual knowledge, but helped foster the emergence of a historical narrative about Victorian censorship that would serve as a powerful justification for sexual-scientific research and sex reform movements in the twentieth century. At the same time, this narrative would obfuscate the extent to which Victorians enjoyed access to sexual information in the new age of mass print.

Chapter 4, Obscene… in a Certain Sense, shows how charges of obscenity were used against pornographers and irregulars during the 1850s and 1860s, amid landmark changes to obscenity law. In doing so, it introduces one of the book’s major arguments: that allegations of medical obscenity were usually tactical, and became increasingly imbricated in projects aimed at contesting medical authority. The most influential anti-vice group of the period, the Society for the Suppression of Vice, led a crackdown on the pornography trade during this period, which brought medical works into the courtroom, and some were destroyed on the grounds that they were obscene. The chapter parallels arguments that medical works could be obscene in court with tactics in the medical press. With mixed success, campaigns against “obscene quackery” attacked irregular practitioners who treated sexual issues by arguing that their manuals’ low prices and wide circulation made them a threat to public morals. The chapter ends with the 1868 formulation of the Hicklin test, a legal test of obscenity that affirmed that arguments examined in this chapter could justify the destruction of medical works.

This introduction outlines how studying the book trade can help us better understand the circulation of medical knowledge about sex and reproduction during the Victorian period, and the development of busineses, institutions, and narratives that claimed authority over it. Weaving a historiographic overview with an overview of the book’s approach and argument, it turns readers’ attention to medical works’ status as more than texts, highlighting the fact that they are material objects that must be made, promoted, and distributed, and that these actions accrue meanings of their own. It then articulates the book’s focus on the activities of four differently identified groups of players – pornographers, radicals, regular practitioners, and irregular practitioners – who brought sexual knowledge into non-expert readers’ hands and, in various ways, became embroiled in debates about medical obscenity. The introduction then outlines how the book tracks these agents’ intersecting activities to open up an argument about how and why allegations of obscenity became a means of selling books, contesting authority, and consolidating emergent collective identities.

Chapter 5, Dull Instead of Light, examines regular practitioners’ increasing efforts to disambiguate “medicine” and “quackery” in the wake of the 1868 formulation of the Hicklin test of obscenity. The first section explores how medical groups experimented with using obscenity laws as alternatives to the Medical Act (1858) to regulate medical practice. These actions’ impact on the book trade is debatable, but regular practitioners’ tireless efforts to collapse quackery and obscenity influenced new legislation governing medical advertising. The rest of the chapter examines parallel efforts to professionalize medical publishing. In advocating for limitations on medical book advertising, the use of dry, technical language in medical writing, and other changes to medical print culture, regular practitioners further sought to disambiguate “medicine” from “quackery.” The lines between popular and professional medical works had previously been blurry. The changes examined in this chapter helped cleave a growing chasm between the kinds of sexual knowledge accessible to medical and non-medical audiences.

Whether consumer law should address inequality has been approached from different perspectives in Latin America and Europe. EU consumer law has primarily relied on the interpretive benchmark of the average consumer, leading to a model of “empowerment through information” in service of maximum harmonization and economic integration. In Latin America, by contrast, statutes emphasize consumer protection based on the paradigm of the vulnerable consumer, leading to more robust substantive protection in addition to classic disclosure rules. This chapter compares the EU regime to the heterodox approach of Argentina, where courts have embraced the task of using consumer protection law to reduce inequality. Moreover, a recent Argentinean reform introduced the category of the hyper-vulnerable consumer to provide enhanced protection to consumers in a situation of aggravated vulnerability due to age, gender, physical or mental state, or social, economic, ethnic, and/or cultural circumstances. The chapter also discusses the prospect of reverse convergence (i.e., EU law converging to the Latin American mode) in view of European scholars’ growing call for the recognition of “structural vulnerabilities” in the context of the digital economy, which happens to be dominated by US companies.

How do private law institutions of developing countries differ from those of developed countries? A common view is that the legal systems of the Global South are often outdated, failed transplants of Global North models, or plagued by enforcement challenges. This book project offers a different perspective by focusing on legal innovation and adaptation in the Global South. We examine how countries in the Global South have embraced legal doctrines and solutions that deviate from approaches that currently hold the status of orthodoxy in richer countries, and pursue distinct and potentially broader public policy objectives or reflect different values, in response to conditions that are commonplace in developing countries. Our analysis points to reasons why the legacy of colonialism, limited fiscal capacity, economic dependence on richer countries, and macro-economic volatility may encourage lawmakers in poor countries to develop heterodox doctrines. We explore different manifestations of legal heterodoxy across various areas of private law in a range of countries in the Global South. Recognizing legal heterodoxies in the Global South enlarges our understanding of legal experiences and possibilities, and contributes to our understanding about the driving forces and direction of legal evolution around the world.

India’s landmark corporate law reform in 2013 contained a pioneering attempt to mandate corporate spending of 2 percent of average profits on corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. This chapter explores a puzzle: The CSR requirement could have been written as a CSR tax rather than a CSR spending requirement, so why did the government choose the latter, more heterodox, option? The analysis suggests that the motivation for the reforms reflects a blend of political optics and state capacity or efficiency considerations informed by historical experiences with market-oriented reforms. On the efficiency and state capacity front, the Indian state might not have been as well placed to enforce a CSR tax as Indian firms might have been able to manage a CSR spending requirement in 2013. On the political optics side there was a prevailing perception that the liberalization had primarily benefited only a very small sliver of the country. If corporations were engaged in CSR then it might look like the gains from economic liberalization were beginning to find their way from India Inc. to the general citizenry. This blended account provides interesting insights about this rather unique set of reforms and subsequent developments.

Prevailing stereotypes depict the corporate laws of developing countries as either antiquated or plagued by problems of enforcement and misfit despite formal convergence. This chapter offers a different view by showing how Global South jurisdictions have pioneered heterodox stakeholder approaches in corporate law. Examples of those approaches include the erosion of limited liability for purposes of stakeholder protection in Brazil and India, the adoption of mandatory corporate social responsibility in Indonesia and India, and a large-scale program of Black corporate ownership and empowerment in South Africa, among many others. By incorporating broader public policy and distributional objectives into corporate law, heterodox stakeholderism can be interpreted as an institutional adaptation to a context of high inequality and externalities that remain unaddressed through other areas of law. As the rise of inequality and growing distrust of the state’s ability to tackle social and environmental concerns have brought the Global North closer to the Global South’s realities, the resurgent interest in stakeholderism in the developed world constitutes a surprising form of “reverse convergence” that merits greater attention. Heterodox stakeholderism in the Global South also responds to critical, but heretofore neglected, distributional implications of corporate law rules.

The COVID-19 pandemic threatened to worsen pre-existing economic inequality in China. This chapter discusses how the Chinese party-state used distinctive “ultra-heterodox” measures to alter or nullify contractual terms in contractual disputes during the pandemic that raised serious concerns about inequality, social unrest, or systemic financial risk. Specifically, courts would refer such disputes to either mediation, insolvency, or a “macro-prudential” proceeding that involved courts collaborating with government agencies, party officials, and stakeholders of firms experiencing financial distress to negotiate and implement resolutions of disputes. These procedures allow the party-state to achieve its objectives of preventing market disruption, social unrest, and financial crisis triggered by unfair and unequal contracts. The “negotiated legality” reflected in these measures works in China because of the dominance of the party-state, widespread acceptance among contracting parties of a communitarian understanding of liability and responsibility, and the efficiency of postponing risk allocation to the enforcement stage from the contract formation stage in an emerging market.

In 2021, the Brazilian Supreme Court issued a landmark decision which declared that a portion of Section 40 of the Brazilian Patent and Trademark law violated the constitutionally enshrined right to health. The challenged provision automatically extended the terms of certain patents for up to ten years, a much longer period than permitted under any other patent regime in the world. It was adopted following lobbying from foreign pharmaceutical companies over the objections of local elites. The impugned provision qualified as an example of ultra-orthodoxy, defined here as the adoption of radically neo-liberal legal institutions in developing countries as a result of the lobbying efforts of industries with substantial economic power. The ruling by the Brazilian Supreme Court merely brought Brazilian law into line with the TRIPS agreement, the benchmark for legal orthodoxy. At the same time, the ruling was heterodox in several respects, including the interpretation of the right to health as a collective human right, the value given to independent academic opinions, and the attention paid to comparative law, particularly involving other countries from the Global South. It remains to be seen whether backlash against the decision will mute its potentially beneficial distributive effects.

Chinese courts routinely ask defendants to pay damages without evidence of negligence while relying on concepts such as fairness, substantive justice, or discretion. This chapter examines how Chinese courts arrive at decisions that feel fair or just in cases where they refer to those ideas. Analysis of a dataset of 10,000 judicial decisions in personal injury cases suggests that Chinese courts refer to these concepts when they impose liability on two types of parties: (1) participants in a shared activity and (2) those who control a physical space. By assigning legal responsibility in these cases, Chinese courts acknowledge traumatic harm, spread economic losses through communities, and, when they award substantial sums, act as agents of redistribution. These practices survived the 2021 adoption of the Civil Code, which reduced courts’ discretion to impose equitable liability in tort cases. This study therefore points to several potentially distinctive features of China’s embrace of legal heterodoxy in tort law. Those features include the ongoing influence of China’s socialist and pre-revolutionary legal traditions, divergence between legal provisions and legal practice, and the possibility that heterodox practices will serve bureaucratic interests and Party-state goals along with other social policy goals.